The Heavenly Abodes
In our last article, we postulated that the “many rooms” Jesus spoke of at John 14:2 may be residential dwellings, as well as schools of learning wherein we transition ‘from glory to glory’ (1 Corinthians 3:18), perfecting our personalities until we attain spiritual bodies which will allow us to appear before the very person of the Father. After all, the book of Revelation tells us “the Lamb at the center of the throne will be their shepherd; he will lead them to springs of living water.” (Revelation 7:17) That sounds to us like education, instruction, guidance and training. Accordingly, we will call these heavenly rooms “training worlds” preparing us for the true spiritual world in our eternal future.
We suspect that these training worlds are physical and material in composition, but made of a material of a higher quality substance than the earth.
“Then the angel showed me the river of the water of life, as clear as crystal, flowing from the throne of God and of the Lamb down the middle of the great street of the city. On each side of the river stood the tree of life, bearing twelve crops of fruit, yielding its fruit every month. And the leaves of the tree are for the healing of the nations.”
– Revelation 22:1-2
In addition to life sustaining vegetation, we can expect that there would be a life-supporting atmosphere to sustain our new bodies, much like we have a nitrogen/oxygen-based atmosphere that supports our current bodies. But we suspect the weather on those transition worlds would be much more stable than on our planet and thus we can exclude the possibility of severe weather anomalies such as earthquakes, volcano eruptions, burning heat, torrential rains, tornados and the like. For example, we read in Revelation:
“Never again will they hunger; never again will they thirst. The sun will not beat down on them, nor any scorching heat.”
– Revelation 7:16
We further read in Genesis that in the beginning, instead of rain falling from above, “streams came up from the earth and watered the whole surface of the ground.” (Genesis 2:6) Maybe the training worlds will likewise be watered. So, we expect the weather and temperature would be rather mild year round.
That leads us to wonder about our new homes. If the Father saw fit to have us on earth build individual dwelling places, it seems likely that there will be individual dwelling places in the heavenly world. But what kind of homes? We suspect there will be walls so that we can have a measure of privacy. But we wonder, since the weather will be so pleasant, will our homes have roofs? What purpose would roofs serve? It is possible that as we recline in our new homes, we will be looking up to the stars as our canopy, with a constant flow of clean fresh air.
Here, when the wind blows, we refer to it as “whistling.” Do you think the wind on the training worlds will whistle? Or perhaps the sound will be melodic, or harmonic. What if the sound of the breeze is a calming song?
